In the trap was a fine haul of cod, and when they had removed the fish the trap was transferred to a new position where it would be quite safe until the menacing iceberg had drifted away.

There were seventeen families living in Red Bay.  As settlements go, down on The Labrador, seventeen cabins, each housing a family, is deemed a pretty good sized place.

At Red Bay, as elsewhere on the coast, bad seasons for fishing came now and again.  These occur when the ice holds inshore so long that the best run of cod has passed before the men can get at them; or because for some unexplained reason the cod do not appear at all along certain sections of the coast.  When two bad seasons come in succession, starvation looms on the horizon.

Seasons when the ice held in, Skipper Tom could not set his cod trap.  When this happened he was as badly off as any of his neighbors.  In a season when there were no fish to catch, it goes without saying that his trap brought him no harvest.  Fishing and trapping is a gamble at best, and Skipper Tom, like his neighbors, had to take his chance, and sometimes lost.  If he accumulated anything in the good seasons, he used his accumulation to assist the needy ones when the bad seasons came, and, in the end, though he kept out of debt, he could not get ahead, try as he would.

The seasons of 1904 and 1905 were both poor seasons, and when, in the fall of 1905, Doctor Grenfell’s vessel anchored in Red Bay Harbor he found that several of the seventeen families had packed their belongings and were expectantly awaiting his arrival in the hope that he would take them to some place where they might find better opportunities.  They were destitute and desperate.

There was nowhere to take them where their condition would be better.  Grenfell, already aware of their desperate poverty, had been giving the problem much consideration.  The truck system was directly responsible for the conditions at Red Bay and for similar conditions at every other harbor along the coast.  Something had to be done, and done at once.

With the assistance of Skipper Tom and one or two others, Doctor Grenfell called a meeting of the people of the settlement that evening, to talk the matter over.  The men and women were despondent and discouraged, but nearly all of them believed they could get on well enough if they could sell their fish and fur at a fair valuation, and could buy their supplies at reasonable prices.

All of them declared they could no longer subsist at Red Bay upon the restricted outfits allowed them by the traders, which amounted to little or nothing when the fishing failed.  They preferred to go somewhere else and try their luck where perhaps the traders would be more liberal.  If they remained at Red Bay under the old conditions they would all starve, and they might as well starve somewhere else.